Three from east metro awarded Bush Fellowships. Here’s what they plan to do.

Frederick Melo, Pioneer Press
·4 min read

In the early days of the pandemic, after the murder of George Floyd, Noel Nix noted many of his coworkers at St. Paul City Hall were dealing with intense stresses, both personal and professional.

Last fall, Nix — St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter’s director of community initiatives — went back to school in his free time to study counseling psychology at the University of St. Thomas, with the general goal of applying the discipline to his work in public service.

“I don’t think it’s uncharted, but I think there’s a lot of room for growth and exploration,” said Nix, who lives in St. Paul’s North End. “How do we support and sustain community leaders in government, nonprofits and other sectors who are working on change?”

Not long ago, Nix learned he’ll receive up to $100,000 to help him on his educational journey. He’s one of three east metro recipients this year of the Bush Fellowship, an annual award offered by the Bush Foundation to support professionals eager to expand their horizons, take a contemplative sabbatical or incorporate new disciplines into their field.

The 24 Bush Fellowship awardees were chosen from some 590 applicants throughout Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota and 23 Native nations in those states. More than 2,000 people have been awarded fellowships from the St. Paul-based foundation, which was endowed by 3M investor and early employee Archibald Bush and his wife, Edyth, in 1953.

Nix said he plans to connect a small network of mental health care practitioners who specialize in supporting service-minded leaders, while studying community-based mental health care models.

“I’m spending nights and weekends learning about mental health counseling while working in the mayor’s office,” said Nix, who plans a public journal of his findings and meditations throughout his fellowship. “I’m looking forward to being able to share more broadly the work I’m doing.”

Janssen Hang, Hmong American Farmers Association

Janssen Hang, a resident of Newport and co-founder and executive director of the Hmong American Farmers Association, said he’ll use his fellowship money to study cooperative farming in the U.S. and abroad, with the goal of someday launching a national Hmong farmers cooperative.

He foresees trips to visit Hmong farms around Fresno, Sacramento and other parts of California’s Central Valley as well as Oregon. Those trips will include a monthlong sabbatical oversees, likely in the Basque region of Spain, where the Mondragon worker cooperative has become one of the European nation’s largest employers.

“It’s not far from our traditional process,” Hang said. “Back in Laos, a lot of our cooperative work revolved around reciprocity, farming a hillside together. We would all gather together and help plant my hillside today, and tomorrow we plant yours. And then when it comes time to harvest, we do the same. If I were to harvest and plant alone, it would take my family five days to do it.”

Some of his research into sustainable cooperatives is born of necessity. Hang, whose grant-backed nonprofit hosts roughly 100 Hmong farmers on 155 acres of land south of Rosemount, said his farmer-members lost more than $100,000 in food contracts in the early days of the pandemic.

“There was a 50% drop in customers going to the farmers markets,” he said.

He launched an online sales platform, but that’s required further training for Hmong elders.

“Our farmer members, they’re not tech savvy,” Hang said. “They don’t own computers. Some of them have never even turned on a computer. We created this whole online training. We issued laptops, like going to a library and checking out books: ‘This is how you access your email. When we send you a Zoom invite, this is what you press.'”

Neerja Singh, state of Minnesota

Raised in India, Neerja Singh enrolled at the University of Minnesota in 2001 for her master’s degree in social work. A licensed mental health professional and drug counselor, she spent eight years as a youth clinician with Ramsey County Corrections and then Nexus Community Partners in St. Paul before becoming the behavioral health clinical director for the state.

She feels there’s more to learn. In her free time, she plans to go back to school at the U to enroll in a professional master’s program in civic engagement, with an emphasis on social justice. She hopes to use the Bush Fellowship to work with community mentors who are informal leaders in efforts to reduce barriers around mental health care, especially within communities of color.

“A lot of communities of color, they don’t access mental health services, because there’s such a stigma around it,” said Singh, of Apple Valley. “And we don’t have a lot of providers of color. Cost is a concern. It’s still not considered part of health care. … (Yet) it’s part and parcel of integrated health.”

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